Aggressor Read online

  It moved quicker as it hit the tarpaper, then slowed again as it encountered the plasterboard. Charlie stopped it again and repeated the operation with the fibre optic.

  I looked over at Half Arse. He was lying on his back with his feet nearest the wall, his pistol resting on his chest, pointing up at the first-floor windows. He must have been freezing his arse off – or what was left of it. I thought about the Americans in the Pods, drinking coffee and smoking cigars while they watched our progress. Most of them were probably wondering why the fuck we didn’t get a move on.

  It took nearly an hour before the drill stopped turning for the third and final time. Charlie did his trick with the fibre optic again and gave us a thumbs-up. He removed the drill bit, put the screwdriver to the first lug, and began to turn it anticlockwise.

  When he’d removed the pyramid, Charlie dug out the microphone. It too was attached to a fibre-optic cable, so it could be put into position correctly.

  I stowed the gear carefully, bit by bit, in my day sack. No point rushing it and making noise.

  With a flourish, Charlie connected the microphone to the lithium battery and laid a metre-long wire antenna on the ground.

  As soon as the power was switched on, there was squelch in my earpiece. The signal was beamed to the Pods and then bounced back to us. We didn’t want to have to get on the net to check that we’d done the business.

  I heard the microphone rustle as Charlie fed it gently into the freshly drilled hole. He stopped now and again, eased it back a fraction, then pushed it through a bit more. As it got closer to the membrane, I could hear a woman murmuring to her children, and a man moaning in agony. It must have been the one who’d taken a round in the stomach during the first attack.

  It was almost time to leave. Charlie closed and relocked the utilities box as I dug the wire into the earth and smoothed it over. He did a quick final sweep of the area with his shielded Maglite, and we got rid of a couple of footprints. Then we started to crawl back to RV [rendezvous] with the Bradley.

  Voices echoed in my earpiece as we went; a man mumbled passages from the Bible; a child whimpered and pleaded for a drink of water.

  We had done our bit.

  Now it was time to hand our toys over to the Americans.

  3

  Two weeks later

  The baby rabbits screamed all night long. It was close to impossible for us to sleep – and we were six hundred metres from the action. Fuck knows what it must have been like for the hundred-odd men, women and children on the receiving end of their relentless squeals, taped on a loop and amplified a thousand times through the AFVs’ loudspeakers.

  It was still dark. I unzipped my sleeping bag just enough to slide my arm out into the cold. I tilted my wrist close to my face and pressed the illumination button on Baby-G. It was 5.38 a.m.

  ‘Day fifty-one of the siege of Mount Carmel.’ I kicked the bag next to me. ‘Welcome to another day in paradise.’

  Anthony stirred. ‘They still playing the same bloody record?’ It was strange hearing him swear in perfect Oxford English.

  ‘Why, mate? You got any requests?’

  ‘Yes.’ His head emerged. ‘Bloody get me out of here.’

  ‘I don’t think I know that one.’

  It didn’t get a laugh.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Half-five, mate. Brew?’

  He groaned as he adjusted position. Tony wasn’t used to sleeping hard. He belonged in a freshly starched white coat, back at his lab, twiddling test tubes over Bunsen burners, not roughing it alongside guys like me, teeth unbrushed so long they’d grown fur, and socks the consistency of cardboard.

  ‘The papers were calling it the siege of Mount Apocalypse yesterday,’ Anthony said. ‘Lambs to the slaughter, more like.’ It came from the heart. He wasn’t at all happy about what was happening here.

  Once we’d fixed the listening devices, nobody was interested in the Brits who’d been sent to Waco to ‘observe and advise’. We were surplus to requirements. After a three-day consultation with Hereford, who’d had a consultation with the FCO, who’d spoken to the embassy in Washington, who’d spoken to whoever, Charlie and Half Arse had flown back to the UK. I was told to stay and keep an eye on Tony. The Americans might still want to use the box of tricks he’d brought along.

  I rolled over and fired up our small camping gas stove, then reached for the kettle. When it came to home comforts, that was pretty much it. There wasn’t a toothbrush in sight, which probably explained why the Yanks kept their distance.

  I looked through one of the bullet holes in the side of the cattle trailer that had been our home for the last five days. The darkness of the Texas prairie was criss-crossed by searchlight beams. The AFVs circled the target buildings like Indians around a wagon train, Nightsuns bouncing wildly. The psyops guys were still making life a living hell for those trapped inside. The media had got it right. We were trapped on the set of Apocalypse Now.

  The compound, as the Feds were calling the Branch Davidians’ hangout, comprised a mishmash of wooden-framed buildings, two three-storey blocks and a large rectangular water tower. In anyone else’s language, it would have been described as a religious community, but that wouldn’t have suited the FBI. The last thing they wanted was for this operation to smack of persecution, so compound it was.

  There’s a ten-day rule when it comes to sieges; if you’ve not resolved the situation by then, the shit has really hit the fan. And we were pushing the envelope five times over. Something had to happen soon. The administration wasn’t looking too clever as it was; with every new day that passed, things just got a whole lot worse.

  The ear-piercing, gut-wrenching screams suddenly stopped. The silence was deafening. I peered through the bullet hole. Three or four AFVs were clustered near the car park. Intelligence from ex-members of the cult had suggested that since storage space inside the buildings was at a premium, a lot of them kept their belongings in the boots of their vehicles.

  The first AFV lurched forward, ploughed through the fence and kept straight on going. I gave Tony another nudge. ‘Fucking hell, look at this.’

  Tony sat up.

  ‘They’re crushing all the cars and buses.’

  ‘What the hell are they trying to do?’

  ‘Make friends and influence people, I guess.’

  We watched the demolition derby while the water boiled.

  4

  As soon as the last vehicle was flattened, the AFVs spread out again. They started to circle, the Davidians’ fresh laundry embedded in their tracks. Almost immediately, the screams of the animals boomed out again from their loudspeakers.

  People were on the move outside our trailer, making their way to and from the array of shower cubicles, toilets and food wagons that had sprung up on our patch of the seventy-seven-acre tented city. An army may march on its stomach, but US law enforcement drives there in a stretch limo and gets paid overtime.

  There was no shortage of bodies to be catered for. SWAT teams, FBI hostage rescue teams, federal marshals, local sheriffs; the place was teeming with them. No fewer than four Pods were sprinkled around the compound. Alpha Pod was right next door to our trailer; the other three had their own command set-up, and, as far as we could make out, were doing their own thing. There were more chiefs than Indians on this prairie, that was for sure, and nobody seemed to be in overall charge. To make matters worse, they all wanted to be, and every man and his dog was clearly itching to fire up the biggest and ugliest military toys they could get their hands on.

  This operation had all the makings of a weapons-grade gangfuck, and there was a rock-festival-sized audience gathering to witness it. Hordes of shiny, aluminium-skinned Airstreams, clapped-out Winnebagos and bog-standard pickups lined the road the far side of the cordon. The rubberneckers were coming from miles around for a good day out, sitting on their roofs, clutching their binos, enjoying the fun. There was even a funfair, and stall upon stall selling everything from hotdogs
and camping gas stoves to Davidians: 4, ATF: 0 emblazoned T-shirts [Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Bureau of].

  This was certainly cowboy country, in more ways than one. Waco was about a hundred miles south of Dallas, and home to the Texas Rangers’ museum. Everybody I’d seen at the funfair seemed to be wearing a Stetson. Everybody apart from the Ku Klux Klan, that is. They’d turned up three days ago, offering the FBI their help getting in there and killing all them drug-taking, cult-loving child molesters.

  Tony and I sank back down and finished off our brews while I got the kettle on for the next round. It was the highlight of the day.

  Muffled speech and laughter came and went along the outside of the trailer. I smelled cigarette smoke. The cocking of weapons and ripping of body-armour Velcro signalled the change of shift. By my reckoning there were at least three hundred police officers on-site, with vehicles to match. Most of them were in BDUs [United States Army battledress], and carrying enough weaponry to see off a small invasion.

  I also knew that the Combat Applications Group – Delta Force – had a team here somewhere. Delta had been modelled on the same squadron and doctrine set-up as the Special Air Service in the 1970s. They were probably doing much the same as we were, stuck at one of the Pods, being told jack shit about what was going on and sleeping rough in a trailer. I hoped so, anyway.

  We all knew that it was illegal for the military to act against US citizens. The Posse Comitatus Act banned it from domestic law enforcement, and ‘domestic’ included a three-mile stretch of territorial water. There was only one exception to the rule: President Clinton had signed a waiver allowing law officers on drugs interdiction operations to use military vehicles and personnel to combat the forces ranged against them. In other words, the ATF and FBI had a Get Out Of Jail Free card, and judging by the Abrams tank parked up across the way, it looked like they intended to play it at the first available opportunity.

  David Koresh and his fellow Bible-bashers couldn’t have known what they were letting themselves in for when they resisted the original attack by the ATF almost two months earlier.

  5

  The water boiled. I tipped Nescafé into two mugs and poured. You couldn’t move for catering wagons round here, but I didn’t fancy joining the breakfast queue now the night shift was over. Apart from anything else, it meant venturing out into the cold, and I liked to put that off until the sun came up.

  I hung on to Tony’s brew as he faffed about, trying to unzip. He rubbed his eyes and groped around for his glasses in the glow from the stove. He was all right, I supposed. He was thirty-something, with the kind of nose that made it look like his forefathers came from Easter Island. His hair was brown, and style-wise he’d gone for mad professor. Either he didn’t have any idea what he looked like or, more likely, he just didn’t care; because he was one, his head so full of chemical formulae he didn’t seem to know what day it was.

  There were nine thousand or so eggheads employed by DERA [Defence Evaluation and Research Agency], and Tony was one of them. You didn’t ask these guys at exactly which of the eighty or so establishments up and down the UK they worked, but I was pretty sure, given why he was here, that he wouldn’t be a complete stranger to the germ warfare laboratories at Porton Down in Wiltshire.

  I’d looked after boffins like him before, holding their hand in hostile environments, or escorting them into premises neither of us should really have been in, and I tended to just let them get on with whatever they had to do. The less I knew, the less shit I could be in if things went pear-shaped. These sorts of jobs always tended to come back and kick you in the bollocks. But one thing always puzzled me: Tony and his mates had brains the size of hot-air balloons, and spent their whole lives grappling with the secrets of the universe – so how come they couldn’t even get a decent brew on?

  The RAF had flown a big container in with us to Fort Hood, then had it trucked on-site, and Tony carried the keys. He seemed pretty much a pacifist, so maybe it just contained enough fairy dust to make everybody dance out of the building, but I doubted it. The FBI had been pretty keen to have access to Charlie’s siege surveillance devices, but the inside of Tony’s head was what they really wanted. His business was advanced gases; he seemed to be on first-name terms with every molecule on the planet. What’s more, he knew how to mix them so precisely that they killed, immobilized, or merely incapacitated you to the point where you were still able to crawl.

  A flurry of shouted instructions belted out of Alpha Pod’s command tent. Special Agent Jim D. ‘Call Me Buster’ Bastendorf was tuning up for his morning gobbing-off session to the new shift commanders, and as usual making everything sound like a bollocking.

  Bastendorf really did like everyone to call him Buster, but it took us no time at all to christen him Deaf Bastard, then, because it was less of a mouthful, Bastard for short.

  Bastard was a Texan and that meant everything – his shoulders, arms, hands and, most of all, his stomach – was bigger than it needed to be. It would have done him no harm at all to stay away from the two-pound T-bones after Christmas. He had a severe crew cut and a heavily waxed Kaiser Wilhelm moustache. He kept on curling the ends, as if letting them droop would be a sign of weakness. Yessirree, Jim D. Bastendorf knew exactly what his mission was: to kick ass, bust heads, solve the problem.

  Everything was a battle for this man; every minute of every day was a fight he had to win. His jaws worked non-stop on chewing tobacco. Every quarter of an hour he’d gob a mouthful of thick, black, saliva-covered crap into a polystyrene cup, trawl out another wad from a tin in his back pocket, and start the whole process again.

  His problem with us began with Tony’s accent. Whenever Tony asked a question or tried to offer some input, he just looked blank, and took to referring to him as ‘that Limey fag in the trailer’ who ‘don’t know shit from Shinola’. I was this other Brit waste of space who kept asking damn-fool questions: ‘What about this? What about that? Do you really think that keeping these guys awake 24/7 is going to get them to come out?’

  When it came down to it, he didn’t have a clue what we were doing here. Our brief was short and to the point. So long as we kept out of his way, had the correct little blue passes hanging from our necks at all times, and shared his view that we’d all been floundering helplessly till he rode over the hill like the Fifth Cavalry, we could stay here for ever, for all he cared – which was just fine by me, because I didn’t care much either. If Bastard didn’t want to listen, it wasn’t my problem. The Davidians’ water supply had been fucked up, and sooner or later they’d get hungry or thirsty or bored. They’d come out eventually, so I’d just keep getting the kettle on for Tony and me until the white flags started appearing.

  Bastard roared with laughter. People were shouting instructions to get over to the command post. Something was happening.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ Bastard boomed. ‘Check this out – showtime!’

  I unzipped my bag and got to my feet. There was another sound above the scream of rabbits and screech of tank tracks. Bastard had thrown a switch so that his mates could listen in on the conversation between the negotiators and the Bible-bashers.

  Achild of no more than five was on the phone inside the compound. I could hear muffled crying in the background. ‘Are you going to kill me?’ her small voice asked.

  6

  The negotiator was on a US Air Force base miles away – another bad tactic. He spoke gently, as Bastard’s boys in the command tent shrieked and whistled. ‘No, honey, no-one is coming to kill you.’

  ‘You sure? The tanks are still outside . . .’

  ‘The tanks won’t hurt you, honey.’

  Another, male voice took over in the compound. ‘Why are you letting your guys drop their pants at our women?’ He was going apeshit. ‘These are decent women in here; you know that’s not the way to go. Why should we trust you?’

  Bastard roared, ‘About time them bitches saw some prime ass!’

  From the sound of it
, this got his boys’ vote. I bet they were mooning at the speaker.

  I exchanged a glance with Tony, who’d been staring at his coffee. We both listened as the negotiator tried to come back with a reasonable response. ‘You know what these guys are like; you know the ones who fly the helicopters or drive the tanks, they haven’t got the same mindset as us. I’ll try and do something about it, OK?’

  Bastard guffawed. ‘Fuck that, and fuck you too, Mr Mindset! You just keep on talking; leave the ass-kicking to the big boys.’

  There was a fresh burst of applause. I could picture the big boys shrugging off their pants again, waving their arses at the speaker.

  I took a sip of my brew. Whatever the negotiator said, it didn’t look good for Koresh and his crew. The ATF had ignored his invitation to come in and inspect the place for illegal weapons and whatever else they thought the Davidians had up their sleeves, and instead had mounted a full-scale armed operation.

  Maybe it was a coincidence, but it just so happened that the ATF were losing credibility in Washington right now, and it was budget time. They clearly wanted to put on a bit of a display – they’d invited the media along, and given them ringside seats. They’d even got their own cameras rolling, in case the newshounds missed any of the action.

  The Branch Davidians must have known something was up when they clocked the film crews setting up shop. Their suspicions would have been confirmed when helicopters started swooping round the rear of the compound, partly to draw their attention away from the cattle trailers full of armed ATF agents headed for the front door, partly so the US public could see their tax dollars on the screen.

  The Davidians returned fire, as they were entitled to do under American law. They even called 911 to tell the police they were being attacked, and begged for help.